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MEXICO CITY—His name was Arturo Durazo Moreno, and he was once the most reviled man in Mexico.

Those were the 1980s, when an octopus-like political organization called the PRI — the Spanish acronym for the Institutional Revolutionary Party — still dominated this country, extending its tentacles into just about every sector of Mexican society.

Once described as “the perfect dictatorship,” the PRI was authoritarian and corrupt but also ruthlessly efficient — and it enabled thugs like Durazo Moreno to flourish.

After ruling Mexico for 71 years, the party was finally ousted from the presidency in 2000, a signal event in this country’s ongoing transformation into a modern, democratic state.

Now, just 12 years later, Mexico’s voters seem poised to bring the octopus back, possibly condemning their country to a system of graft and repression many thought they had at long last escaped.

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“It’s a possibility, not a certainty,” academic and pundit Lorenzo Meyer wrote this week in Mexico City’s Reforma newspaper. “But it’s a possibility we never should have reached.”

If you believe the opinion polls, it’s a dead certainty that Enrique Pena Nieto, a former state governor with matinée idol looks, will recover the keys to the presidential residence, Los Pinos, after Mexicans head out to vote on Sunday.

Most recent polls give the PRI standard-bearer a double-digit lead over his nearest rival, generally deemed to be former Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, champion of the Mexican left.

The intense three-month campaign has unfolded against a background of searing violence in many parts of the country, as Mexico’s powerful drug-running cartels wage war both against each other and against the army and police.

The fighting has claimed at least 50,000 lives in the past six years, although some experts judge the toll to be even higher.

“I’m putting that number in doubt,” said Ernesto López Portillo, head of the Institute for Security and Democracy in Mexico City. “Mexico is only beginning to count its victims.”

It is a matter of heated debate whether a Pena Nieto victory on Sunday will benefit all of Mexico or just the PRI.

Many Mexicans — including a large and active student movement — regard the prospect of a PRI win with undisguised horror, while others take a more sanguine view, and still others insist that the PRI never actually lost power in this country.

True, a former businessman named Vicente Fox wrested the presidency from the PRI 12 years ago, to be replaced six years later by now-outgoing president Felipe Calderón, both of them members of the National Action Party.

But the PRI didn’t disappear.

“During all those 12 years, the PRI always ruled at least half of Mexico’s states,” said Jean-François Prud’homme, of the prestigious Colegio de Mexico. “In many states, the PRI has never been out of power.”

Founded in 1929, the PRI defined itself as the heir of the Mexican Revolution, a bloody conflict waged from 1910 to 1917 or so.

Initially a populist organization with leftist tendencies, the party grew more conservative over time. Under PRI rule, each successive president enjoyed near-absolute power at least for the single six-year term allotted him by the country’s constitution. Then he would depart office with his ministers and their minions, all far wealthier than when they began.

Many Mexicans look back on the decades of PRI dominance as a dark era of corruption and oppression, and they aren’t entirely wrong.

When it was unable to solve problems peacefully, the PRI did not hesitate to use sterner measures, as when hundreds of protesting youths were massacred by government forces in Mexico City, shortly before the 1968 Olympic Games.

The PRI held tight control over labour unions, business groups and the emerging middle class, but it also delivered seven decades of relative social peace, something few other Latin American countries can claim.

“It was never totalitarian,” said Prud’homme. “The PRI was able for many years to redistribute public goods to different sectors of the population. Until the 1980s, it had a high degree of acceptance.”

But then the money ran out, and Mexico was plunged into an economic crisis that lasted a decade or more — and the PRI began to pull itself apart.

Now it seems set to assume national dominance once more.

Some here insist they are not surprised. For better or worse, they say, the PRI is what this country knows.

“Mexican society is very conservative and authoritarian,” said López Portillo. “We don’t have a democracy that has put down its roots.”

Others point to an ongoing corruption scandal involving allegations against two recent governors of Tamaulipas state, both members of the PRI — proof, they say, that the party is the same graft-ridden outfit it always was.

Maybe it is. But Mexico has changed mightily in the past 12 years, both in the expectations of its citizens and in the structures of state.

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